![]() Think of a song like Jay-Z’s On to the Next One and its tornado of swirling electronics, or the Rocky-appropriate horns on TI’s Swing Ya Rag. Kanye West once declared that Swizz “may be the best rap producer of all time”, and Swizz’s work can be defined by its sheer scope: symphonic but often with a hard edge, his beats are the kind to reach the corners of an 80,000-seater stadium. I feel like that’s what people should know: DMX was a giver.” ![]() He never posted any of these good deeds at all or talked about them. The way you’d find out what DMX was doing was through other people posting it, never him. He would pull over the car and talk to a homeless person, or a mother that looked like she needed help with something. He would give clothes off his back to homeless people and walk home in his boxers. “I know there’s a lot of negative stories, but DMX was a humanitarian. Swizz is now overseeing the rollout of Exodus, and telling the world of what he sees as the rapper’s true nature. I sent him this old school hip-hop playlist, and that was the last time I heard from him … It was very quick.” I know there’s a lot of negative stories, but DMX was a humanitarian – and it wasn't for press or social media Swizz Beatz I’m like, ‘Why is he writing this?’ Then I wrote him back. “ just wrote me how appreciative he was for everything I’ve done for him. Three days later, Swizz received an unusual text. The final time Swizz spoke to him was just before boarding a flight, with DMX asking if they could connect soon. Yet on 2 April, DMX was rushed to White Plains hospital, New York following a reported drug overdose, where he was placed on life support, and died a week later. There were plans for him to take up a two-month workout programme in preparation for the album release. Swizz describes DMX as being in a “great space” towards the end. “He decided to embrace his peers, artists who had love for him.” “If you look back on the history of DMX albums they weren’t feature-heavy, unless it was artists that were in the family,” says Swizz. Even Bono appears on the song Skyscrapers he later sent some personal drawings to the rapper along with a letter calling him “DMX the BMX”. He and Swizz crafted a prestige album featuring high-end production, a broad spectrum of themes, and starry cameos: Jay-Z, Nas, Lil Wayne and Usher among them. DMX was transformed once more into the sneering, barking ball of energy you heard on his peak-era records, his voice a little thicker and more weathered than before but his flow well preserved. “It made him really excited and it put him in a very collaborative space”. After squaring off with fellow 1990s veteran Snoop Dogg on Verzuz, he rode the momentum into Snoop’s studio in Los Angeles after “seeing all the love and the feedback from the fans,” Swizz says. It took an appearance last year on webcast series Verzuz, co-created by Swizz, to end the recording drought. The latter period of his life was marked by personal setbacks: prison terms for offences including tax evasion, drug possession, driving charges and failure to pay child support, and problems with addiction and bankruptcy. The key with this is that he was ready.”Įxodus breaks a near-decade album drought for DMX, born Earl Simmons. That’s the thing: you can have a big plan for someone but if they don’t have that plan for themselves, it’s just you having a plan. “He deserved it to be big, and he accepted it to be big. “For me and him to go back in the studio like this, we had to go big,” Swizz says, speaking over Zoom. Swizz Beatz’ phone contacts is a list of musical aristocracy – he’s made key tracks for Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Busta Rhymes and more, and is married to Alicia Keys – but his name has always been tethered to DMX like no other: he produced two of his biggest hits, Party Up (Up in Here) and Ruff Ryders’ Anthem, and handled the majority of the beats on his second album Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood. It is the final pillar propping up a broad legacy: DMX was the first artist to have five albums in a row debut at No 1 in the US, and Exodus will surely also top the charts this week. That description suggests a project pieced together from odds and ends to make a quick dollar, but DMX completed Exodus before he died on 9 April, aged 50, after a heart attack. “I keep seeing that, and it’s so annoying that I can’t correct everybody,” he says. Its executive producer, Swizz Beatz, is adamant about that. ![]() D on’t call DMX’s Exodus a “posthumous album”. ![]()
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